


Special

by Scrunyuns



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Age Difference, Blood Kink, Fantasizing, Fingering, Hand Jobs, Hand Kink, Height difference, Irving cameo, Knife Kink, M/M, Masturbation, Medical Kink, Praise Kink, Schrödinger’s Boner, feeble attempts at foreshadowing, first time writing Hickey’s POV :0, hickey is a lonely touch starved SLUT, hickey is an unreliable narrator so we will never know!, hickey is basically dennis reynolds: “I HAVE FEELINGS???”, if you will, massage (prostate and otherwise), mentions of past Hickey/Gibson, this is one-sided... OR IS IT, will I ever write something that is NOT horny?? not today Jesus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:00:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23501221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scrunyuns/pseuds/Scrunyuns
Summary: When Hickey is at his most vulnerable, he makes an unlikely friendship. But he soon gets greedy for more.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Dr Alexander McDonald
Comments: 20
Kudos: 41





	Special

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this fic ‘cuz Hickey’s knife is apparently a surgical blade, according to historians... which is, you know, INTERESTING
> 
> Dedicated to the other 2.5 people who ship this tragic ass rarepair lol

“Settle yourself, lad. We need to clean and salt you, then we'll dress these wounds.”

Cornelius Hickey knew quite well who the assistant surgeon was. Hickey knew everyone aboard this ship, or at the very least he knew _of_ them. But Dr. Alexander McDonald had remained entirely inconsequential to him until today. Now the caulker’s mate suddenly finds himself laying naked and bleeding across the surgeon’s slab, finds himself worrying about what will happen next, what McDonald might do to him.

He’s never been given much reason to trust doctors.

The wet cloth is cold as ice on his skin, but when McDonald lays his hands on him Hickey notices they are rather warm, unusually so. On what few and rare occasions that he had been to see a doctor, there was never one that ever had warm hands - nor gentle hands, for that matter.

Hickey also expects further admonishment and harsh critique of his character, but when the doctor opens his mouth to speak, he can find nothing of the sort. Dr. McDonald simply gives him direction and encouraging words, entirely without judgement. Even now, in this moment of great pain and humiliation, Hickey is calmed by he doctor’s soft Scottish lilt.

Wounds need time to heal, this he knows, but he hadn’t expected he’d be asked to keep coming back again and again for rehabilitating treatment. Where he’s from, you get a once-over from the local sawbones - that is, if you are even lucky enough to be able to see one, if you have the coin - and you’re sent on your way. No follow-up checks. You get even the most innocuous of cuts, and more often than not it’s a death sentence.

Well, such is not out here on the HMS Terror; Her Majesty’s Royal Navy mind their investments, to the best of their ability.

Hickey has to remind himself of this as McDonald lays his warm hands on him once more, and he can feel a knot of nerves tightening in the pit of his stomach. He has to remind himself again and again when the doctor soothes him with words of kindness, understanding and encouragement.

Most irritatingly, what springs to mind now is Billy Gibson, the first time they’d had a proper conversation. The lanky, quiet steward had found Hickey in a corner of the lower deck, crouching in a corner with his head in an empty bucket. He’d been hiding away from the rest of the men in order to deal with his nausea, hoping to keep his terrible weakness a secret.

He’d been embarrassed, but Billy had been kind.

“Here’s something I traded for on my last stint,” he’d said, a shy smile as he handed him a jar of pickled ginger. “That should settle your stomach a bit.”

It had settled his seasickness alright, but not his stomach. The ache had grown worse over time, until Billy had finally put an abrupt stop to it. This had stung something fierce, but just like a physical wound it appeared to hurt less and less with time... It was just another weakness he didn’t need, really.

But now, in Dr. McDonald’s surgery, that feeling in his stomach is back with full force.

_Ah, bugger it all. Not again._

The good doctor always attempts small talk while salting him. “Where are you from, do you have any family,” textbook stuff. Hickey would normally find it irritating and disingenuous, the nervous habit of a man too insecure to enjoy a good, long silence. And he won’t let himself be fool enough to think that McDonald actually cares one way or the other... but he welcomes the chitchat with open arms nevertheless; it takes the mind off the vicious sting of the salt, at least a little.

There’s one gash that is particularly painful to go over and Hickey tenses up, but Dr. McDonald is quick to reassure him.

“It’ll be done with soon, lad. I promise.”

A few more weeks of having McDonald’s warm, gentle hands on him, and Hickey is starting to think that perhaps he doesn’t want it to be done with, ever.

Over time, the assistant surgeon and the caulker’s mate get to know each other quite well. It’s always just the pair of them in that surgery, Dr. Peddie having “more important matters to attend,” whatever that means, and McDonald wants to do all that he can to distract his patient from the searing pain. So the doctor engages him in conversation.

And Hickey is, against all his own predictions, slowly beginning to enjoy the company. It would seem the Scotsman is actually a most formidable conversationalist; Dr. McDonald appears to be an intelligent fellow even in matters that don’t merely concern the corporeal, and - perhaps most important of all - he does not deign to pry into things that are none of his business. This is a rare commodity, and something that has got Hickey now holding him in very high esteem.

McDonald simply listens and shares, and he shares plenty. He’ll be regaling Hickey with stories of his many adventures at sea, grisly ones of dengue fever, gangrene, scurvy, frostbite, even exploding teeth. It’s all stomach-churning stuff, but Hickey has never been repelled by that sort of thing. In fact, he delights in it.

And Hickey likes to think that McDonald delights in hearing what little he has to share about himself, too.

The young sailor can feel his guard starting to slip; he doesn’t even flinch when McDonald at one point reaches out to lay a gentle hand upon his shoulder.

It is meant to be a calming gesture, of course. Hickey knows this. Carefully, the doctor rubs circles into the tense muscles, trying to still his patient as he works the salt into a particularly sore area.

 _Like an animal,_ Hickey thinks. _Like stroking the muzzle of a skittish horse._

But another voice pipes up, and this one is far more dominant: _It’s because he_ wants _to touch you. It’s because you are special._

He lets warm hands guide and adjust him as Dr. McDonald dresses him in clean bandages, fingers occasionally brushing against his parts. _It must be deliberate,_ Hickey decides. He starts growing hard. The good doctor either doesn’t notice, or he pretends not to.

Perhaps McDonald is just so accustomed to having lonely, under stimulated sailors reacting to his touch that it doesn’t even faze him anymore.

“You are healing up rather nicely,” McDonald tells him as he is rinsing off his hands in a basin of clean water. “I suppose we won’t need to carry on like this for much longer.”

These are not words he’d been wanting to hear, Hickey now realizes.

He has got his trousers on over his fresh bandages but he still lingers in the surgery room, absentmindedly tracing the length of a surgical knife with his finger.

“How does one become a surgeon, Dr. McDonald?”

The good doctor is too polite to tell him to keep his filthy paws off his tools and go away.

“Had a bit of a knack for it, I suppose,” McDonald shrugs, humble as ever. “And an interest. And a good education… that always helps.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, Doctor.”

McDonald clears his throat. Hickey doesn’t need to look up to know that there is embarrassment written all over his face.

“Do you like that one?” the doctor asks.

For a brief moment, Hickey thinks he’s about to receive the knife as a gift.

“Take care,” McDonald says as he approaches behind him. “It’s rather sharp.”

Hickey inspects the knife in silence. It is clean as a whistle, and he can spy his own reflection in the blade. He hates it, as he hates all forms of mirrors; he could never quite feel connected to the face staring back at him. Every time he sees his own reflection, it makes him wonder if he is even real at all.

“It’s a fine blade,” McDonald starts, his words cutting clear through Hickey’s dark thoughts. “The handle is… ivory.”

The doctor’s voice is cautious but unsteady. And Hickey believes he detects a hint of something else in there as well; Danger? A long-hidden passion? Perhaps they are not so different.

In his mind’s eye, he imagines the knife in McDonald’s hand, the doctor taking the blade to Hickey’s neck and slicing him open from ear to ear. Hickey knows he bleeds red, he has seen it many times over, but he is still forced to remind himself of this every so often.

And what if he were to cut himself open now, and spill all over his own bare skin? Crimson on ivory, what a pretty picture that would make... would Dr. McDonald agree? Would it arouse him? Does he look at Hickey’s bloody ruined backside with an eye that is more than scientific?

Hickey suspects there’s a good reason the man had become a surgeon. And he doesn’t think it is simply because he “had a knack.”

_Put away those silly thoughts now._

When he finally puts the knife down and turns to look at him, Dr. McDonald breathes a sigh of relief - it’s barely audible, but it’s there.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Hickey smiles. “You’ve been most kind to me, these past weeks.”

At night, when every man aboard is snoring softly in his hammock, Hickey slinks off to the privacy of the seat. 

Closing his eyes and reaching down below the hem of his long underwear, he imagines Dr. Alexander McDonald’s warm hands on his body.

The doctor is applying ointment to Hickey’s backside, the way he always does - but this time, his hands wander further, down his patient’s toned thighs. They stop at the bottom of his calves and travel back up, softly kneading the sore muscles there. They go up past the thighs and finally settle on the round globes of his arse. McDonald’s hands are squeezing his buttocks, but in this world of daydreams it doesn’t hurt one bit.

As the Hickey in reality moans, so does the Hickey in his fantasy. Making lustful noises, he grinds his arse back into McDonald’s greedy, covetous palms, knowing it’ll surely provoke a reaction; Hickey knows he has a nice body. A man would have to be most rigid in his moral convictions to turn him away.

And sure enough, his lewd display makes Dr. McDonald’s breath come out heavy and labored.

“You are exquisite…”

In the dark of the cramped little room, Hickey sticks a couple fingers in his mouth. When he pulls them out, they are slick and glistening with his spit, ready to facilitate the next phase of his fantasy:

Dr. McDonald slides his warm, slick fingers down into the crevasse between Hickey’s buttocks and breaches his hole.

Skilled with his hands and learned in the anatomy of man, the good doctor would have no trouble finding the spot that makes Hickey’s whole body sing, leaving him desperate for more. Lifting his arse, the young sailor allows McDonald to grab his cock from under him. The doctor’s thumb circles the leaking head and gives Hickey’s cock a few slow pumps.

_He is so good at that, as well... Of course he is. Of course he is._

The fingers inside him are teasing his prostate, the thumb rubbing at the sensitive area between his balls and his hole. It drives him completely mad. And then Dr. McDonald leans over him to whisper,

“You are going so well, lad…” 

The voice is husky in his ear, McDonald’s breath heavy with lust as he tugs on Hickey’s cock. 

“You are so strong. So special.”

For the first time in months, Cornelius Hickey sleeps all through the night.

The morning brings many duties, and the caulker’s mate is unusually happy to do his job, running up and down the stairs, lifting heavy crates that he really should not be lifting. Lieutenant Irving puzzles at the little sinner’s newfound work ethic, but he also knows not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“I see that your punishment has reformed you, Mr. Hickey... There are many ways in which to please God, but honest and hard work is perhaps the most holy. See that you keep it up.”

“Oh, I will, Sir.”

_If only you knew the half of it, Saint John._

Inevitably, Hickey does a wrong pull. When he feels blood start to seep through his dressings and bandages, finally staining the seat of his trousers, he is all too happy to call it a day and head for the sickbay to get himself cleaned up.

“Have you not been careful in your duties?” Dr. McDonald asks, wiping fresh blood off Hickey’s backside with a clean, wet cloth. “I thought my instructions had been quite clear.”

“Lieutenant Irving seems to have other ideas, Doctor.”

McDonald sighs, frowning.

“I shall have to have words with that man.”

Hickey almost gets hard at the thought of the handsome older doctor laying into Irving for being an irresponsible pissant.

When the doctor arranges Hickey’s fresh dressings, he takes his sweet time with it. He is on his knees now, taking care that the bandages around Hickey’s upper thighs aren’t sitting too tight. It seems rather excessive, and Hickey has to wonder if it might just be that Dr. McDonald, too, is loath to let this end.

“Spread your legs for me a bit.”

The words are not meant to be sexual in nature, but they make the young sailor grow hard beneath the bandages all the same - and this time he truly hopes that the doctor bears witness. Hickey wants him to know what he does to him.

And McDonald does see it; one can tell from the red flush creeping up his neck and spreading in his cheeks as he fumbles with the fastenings.

_No time like the present._

“You can touch me if you want to, Doctor.”

McDonald’s head shoots up, eyes big as saucers staring up at Hickey.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Go on, touch me. I want you to.”

The doctor bristles, letting out a shaky breath as he rises from the floor to stand on unsteady feet.

Dr. McDonald must have a good six inches on Hickey and he is towering over him now - but he still does not appear at all imposing, not in the least. He is usually so calm and composed, but now he is visibly flustered.

“Mr. Hickey,” he starts, hesitant. “You have to understand that I am a doctor. A professional. I-I cannot be...”

The doctor can’t seem to finish his sentence, so Hickey tries to finish it for him.

“Buggering your patients?”

“Yes!” McDonald exclaims, frustrated now.

He turns his back to him, seemingly unable to look Hickey in the eye any longer. Leaning on his desk, the doctor tries to gather himself and find the right words.

“It- it would be highly unethical, amoral, and… and your wounds might tear. Again.”

Hickey stays silent as he inspects McDonald’s knives once more; this has not worked out the way he had hoped and expected, not at all.

“And what’s more, Mr. Hickey,” McDonald continues, “was such an offense not among the list of crimes that had first led you to my doorstep? Do you so desperately wish to be sent back for a second round of lashes?”

Those last words sting more than the cat ever could, and Hickey can’t respond with much more than a defeated sigh. _This again._ Oh, that he must be cursed with a penchant for men so god damned moral and upright...

Warily, McDonald starts to approach him.

“You have misjudged me, Mr. Hickey.” His words are still determined, but his tone softer now; he must have finally remembered how to be discreet. “And I am sorry but… you seem to have mistaken kindness and compassion for desire.”

Hickey still has no words - or rather, he has far too many, and all are too furious or too pathetic to utter aloud. Wouldn’t want to lay his whole hand of cards on the table.

This must make quite the pitiful picture, Hickey realizes, standing there with his trousers down, looking forlorn. The caulker’s mate quickly pulls up his bottoms, tucks his shirt in, and fastens his suspenders.

Dr. McDonald seems to take pity on him; with a sorrowful expression marring his face, he tries to get Hickey to look him in the eyes.

“You should know that I treat every patient that comes through my door with the same degree of professionalism. Well, at least I try to. Now, I apologize if I have said or done anything that could be… misconstrued.”

‘Misconstrued’... He has to laugh. Cornelius Hickey is no flower-pressing maid who will look for answers in a cup of tea leaves and dream up signs of affection that will fit his own preferred narrative; he sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, knows with his brain. And what he knows is that Dr. Alexander McDonald wants his body. He does. But just like Billy, he is too craven to admit it.

Hickey smoothes out his clothes, straightens his back, and forces himself to finally meet the doctor’s gaze.

“I believe it might be best,” McDonald says, his voice now barely above a whisper, “If Dr. Peddie were to take over responsibility for your recovery, moving forward. Wouldn’t you agree?”

With a curt nod and no answer, Hickey turns on his heel and leaves Dr. McDonald’s surgery.

If the assistant surgeon notices a particular blade missing from his surgical kit, he does not bring it up; not today, nor the next day, nor the day after.

**Author's Note:**

> that’s all folks! hope u got ur wank on lmao


End file.
